Roadside Crosses

You see them everywhere
Quiet neighborhoods and super highways
Embellished or plain
Visual reminders of loss
A need for others to remember someone loved
A need to share pain.

Festooned with flowers,
Wreaths or
Birthday balloons …
Some etched with names and dates
Personal yet public sorrow.

My eyes search them out now
Say a silent prayer
In memory of a life lost
Lost love.

Sidekick

If at all possible, marry your best friend.

Annie's Kudzu came from our trucking days, hauling freight all over the country. As I've written elsewhere, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I was the solo driver with Annie as my running mate responsible for keeping me relatively sane in an insane job.

All said and done, however, those two years spent trucking were the ultimate road trip. Annie captured a good portion of it in her poems and other journal musings. With a little encouragement she may be persuaded to share more of her writing here.

I've always considered writing to be a craft, something a person--like me--has to work at, hone and polish from the first moment of picking up a pen to the final period on that last recorded sentence. Writing is a process, and no matter how much work any given writer has published, that process is never finished. Writers, I still believe, are made, not born.

Annie is the only exception to the rule that I have been blessed to know.